“You keep your hair on, Lorne,” he advised.  “We ain’t going to get such big changes yet.  An’ if we do the blooming syndicates ’ll spoil ’em for us.”

There were even dissentients among the farmers.  The voice of one was raised who had lived laborious years, and many of them in the hope of seeing his butter and cheese go unimpeded across the American line.  It must be said, however, that still less attention was paid to him, and it was generally conceded that he would die without the sight.

It was the great topic.  The day Wallingham went his defiant furthest in the House and every colonial newspaper set it up in acclaiming headlines, Horace Williams, enterprising fellow, remembered that Lorne had seen the great man under circumstances that would probably pan out, and send round Rawlins.  Rawlins was to get something that would do to call “Wallingham in the Bosom of his Family,” and as much as Lorne cared to pour into him about his own view of the probable issue.  Rawlins failed to get the interview, came back to say that Lorne didn’t seem to think himself a big enough boy for that, but he did not return empty-handed.  Mr Murchison sent Mr Williams the promise of some contributions upon the question of the hour, which he had no objection to sign and which Horace should have for the good of the cause.  Horace duly had them, the Express duly published them, and they were copied in full by the Dominion and several other leading journals, with an amount of comment which everyone but Mrs Murchison thought remarkable.

“I don’t pretend to understand it,” she said, “but anybody can see that he knows what he’s talking about.”  John Murchison read them with a critical eye and a pursed-out lip.

“He takes too much for granted.”

“What does he take for granted?” asked Mrs Murchison.

“Other folks being like himself,” said the father.

That, no doubt, was succinct and true; nevertheless, the articles had competence as well as confidence.  The writer treated facts with restraint and conditions with sympathy.  He summoned ideas from the obscurity of men’s minds, and marshalled them in the light, so that many recognized what they had been trying to think.  He wrote with homeliness as well as force, wishing much more to make the issue recognizable than to create fine phrases, with the result that one or two of his sentences passed into the language of the discussion which, as any of its standard-bearers would have told you, had little use for rhetoric.  The articles were competent:  if you listened to Horace Williams you would have been obliged to accept them as the last, or latest, word of economic truth, though it must be left to history to endorse Mr Williams.  It was their enthusiasm, however, that gave them the wing on which they travelled.  People naturally took different views, even of this quality.  “Young Murchison’s working the imperial idea for all it’s worth,” was Walter Winter’s; and Octavius Milburn humorously summed up the series as “tall talk.”